Undeterred by Hurricane Katrina, a Couple Rebuild, Renewing their Commitment to New Orleans

Residents of New Orleans are renowned for their will to persevere. Consider the banker and his wife who moved into their new, 15,000-square-foot mansion just before Hurricane Katrina hit the city in 2005. The house was inundated, and they had to evacuate, rescuing whatever antiques and paintings they could.

Their response? Rebuild. Now that’s commitment to your hometown.

The story starts in 1999. As empty nesters, the couple asked Peter M. Trapolin, the founder of the eponymous New Orleans architectural firm, to build them a French Neoclassical-style mansion in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie.

An architecture buff, the banker told Trapolin, “I have a fascination with Palladio,” referring to the 16th-century Italian architect who designed villas for the Venetian gentry—and inspired many of America’s finest antebellum mansions, including the White House.

“Peter convinced me he had the taste and would work with us,” the banker said. “My wife wanted a formal house, but one in which we were sure to use all the rooms—she likes to have dinner in different spaces—and one where we could entertain 250 people.”

Trapolin devised an H-shaped plan so that most of the rooms would have windows on three sides. “There are no dead-end rooms,” he says. This affords the residents sweeping views of the landscape design created by the New York firm Sawyer/Berson and Kenny Rabalais, of the Plant Gallery in New Orleans.

For the interiors, he advocated hiring the Manhattan-based designer Alexa Hampton, with whom he had recently done a house in Mexico. To Hampton’s delight, the couple agreed. “The better the architect, the easier my job is,” she says.

The two made a great team. Together, they went to Texas to select the limestone for the exterior. For the rotunda, Hampton traveled to the quarries of Carrara, Italy, to choose the marble for the floors. She commissioned the wrought iron railing for the staircase, a copy of the one at the National Academy in New York. They discussed every inch of the interior plan, and then Hampton began the décor.

She already had an inventory of antiques. In the dining room, for example, she arranged a pair of Louis XV corner consoles opposite a pair of French commodes after an 18th-century original from Versailles.

A Louis XVI-style, 40-light chandelier illuminated the dining table and chairs, which Hampton designed. Dark green silk-velvet walls were the perfect choice to show off the clients’ old masters, which include biblical subjects by Guido Reni and Luca Giordano, and a Bouguereau genre scene. The resulting room is glamorous and breathtaking.

Hampton chose yellows and reds for the other public rooms. “Everyone has a palette in which they function nicely,” she says. “Color fashions come and go, but a person’s palette is pretty definite.”

The library, where the banker likes to work, is paneled in wood, a neutral backdrop for his favorite picture, The Adoration of the Christ Child by Sandro Botticelli. Its attribution is a post-Katrina gift; while the house was being rebuilt, the banker had the painting cleaned.

“I bought it as ‘attributed to Botticelli,’ but after my curator sent it to the Met in New York for a cleaning and an X-ray, he told me to increase my insurance a lot,” the banker says happily.

Katrina inflicted extensive damage, but last year, after 18 months of rebuilding, the couple returned to the house, a decision that deeply touched everyone involved.

“I don’t know if I’ll ever have another project like this, in terms of the formality and incredible architecture of the house and the commitment of the client,” Hampton says wistfully.